Rita, I can't disagree about The Amazing Race, even though I'm still watching it. (While I'm doing 2 or 3 other things.) The way the current legs are revisiting some tasks from the very first race, and showing brief clips of the very first round of racers (Kevin and Drew!), only reinforces it. To recover what it was 14 years ago, they would have to stop recruiting celebrity-wannabe teams and stick to regular people... and they're not about to do that.

By contrast, of late I've been enjoying PBS's The Great British Baking Show (a renaming of the BBC's The Great British Bake Off), which has finished its 6th season there, and is in the midst of reairing them here. It's a touching reminder of what once seemed to be the appeal of reality competitions: watching people who are good at something show their skills, and learning things I otherwise wouldn't have known. No villains, no manufactured character arcs, no rivalries -- in fact lots of support and camaraderie among the bakers.

Plus, for an Anglophile like me, the appeal of those baking items that are generally only references in books: suet pudding, Chelsea buns, spotted dick, hand-raised meat pies, and all the rest. And Continental ringers like the Swedish princess torte and the frasier cake.

The baking show sounds charming. I've never watched it because while I'll try almost anything else, I just don't like baking. But this show sounds worth looking into.

About last Friday's TAR...did I miss something or was there not one single racer who knew liberté, égalité, fraternité? Not even one? I wasn't surprised at how badly they mangled the French pronunciation, since most of them have trouble with their own language.

I just got caught up with the latest TAR, and the dumb stuff continues. There was that one girl who thought Rotterdam was in Germany and was surprised to find out she was in the Netherlands. And that other racer who pronounced The Hague "Hah-goo". TAR should have an entrance requirement that all participants must have an IQ of at least 80.

Did anyone watch the new series on Starz, Flesh and Bone? I like anything to do with dance, but this show is about the gritty side of a ballet company and the first episode got off to a good start.

One thing Flesh and Bone did right was hire real dancers to play the dancers -- no Black Swan fakery in this show. But did you notice that the longest dance sequence in the episode was not ballet but the striptease act? And we're supposed to believe a ballet director of a financially strapped company would risk his season by scrapping a tried-and-true ballet to commission a new one for an unknown dancer? A dancer he's seen only in rehearsal, without knowing whether she has the stamina to carry a ballet or not? A dancer with only six months of professional experience, and that was five years ago? Ballet dancers start training before their tenth birthdays, some as young as five. Then ten or fifteen years later, if they're lucky, they land a spot in the corps de ballet. Newbies don't get solos, and they certainly don't get new ballets to star in.

Here's my nomination for the worst casting on TV: Patricia Arquette as a tough, savvy, deputy director of the FBI in CSI: Cyber. She's supposed to be the third woman in CBS's Sunday line-up of Strong Women series, but Arquette just doesn't project that image at all. She's more like a soccer mom who wandered onto the set by mistake. CBS evidently thought so too, because they decided the series needed a Strong Man alongside their supposedly Strong Woman. And who is CBS's idea of a Strong Man? Ted Danson. Ted Danson! He just made it worse. From now on I'm turning the set off once The Good Wife finishes.